Nice Computer for Vegas Editing

johnmeyer wrote on 1/28/2009, 4:39 PM

Lots of people ask in this forum: "What computer works well for editing in Vegas?". In response to these numerous threads, many people provide information about their configurations, and offer advice on which things in a computer are important (CPU, CPU, CPU), and which are less important.

I've been on the sidelines for six years, reading these threads and absorbing all the great advice. This past week I finally took the plunge and got a new computer. Since I am VERY happy with my computer, I thought I'd share my experience. While I am sure others might do things differently, it is for me, the perfect Vegas computer.

Of course this recommendation will be obsolete in a few weeks when something better comes along ...

Build vs. Buy

First, I decided to purchase rather than build. I have an EE degree and have built and repaired all manner of electronic equipment, but I have great respect for all the subtle things that have to be done correctly in order to make a computer not only fast, but reliable. Therefore I didn't want to build.

I ruled out the big companies (Dell, HP, etc.) because of all the unnecessary software, and also their inability to add unusual items to the configuration. These companies are very good, and their configurators have many choices, but those choices are still limited.

I quickly narrowed down the choice to Boxx, Falcon Northwest, and Polywell. Boxx and Falcon turned out to be very expensive -- unbelievably so, actually. Polywell, who made the computer I have enjoyed for over six years, once again was the clear favorite. They are also semi-local (I'm in Carmel, CA, and they are in the San Francisco area).

I dealt directly with a salesperson who spent a LOT of time with me, and who really helped me make a decision. He earned his money on this deal, and deserved every nickel. I probably ended up getting quite a few things and spending more money than I would have otherwise (i.e., he did his job ...), but I don't regret any of these extravagances.

Configuration

Based on input in this forum, I built the computer around the Intel i7 chip. I splurged and got the fastest 3.2 GHz clock speed. Polywell builds using a number of mobos, but we used ASUS P6T Deluxe motherboard. This has a huge number of things on the motherboard, including RAID, SATA, and IDE controllers; two network ports; sound; Firewire; and a large number if USB ports. I do lots of sound work, so I opted for the Creative Titanium xFx sound card. The salesman convinced me to go with two 15,000 RPM Cheetah disks, one a 73GB Cheetah 16 for Windows XP, and the other a 146 GB SAS Cheetah H. I have partitioned both of these so that only Windows and Programs are on the main partition, making backup a cinch.

The video card is an nVidia 9800GT.

The computer has 6 GB of DDR 1333 PC3 RAM (3 x 2GB).

I got a LiteOn iHAP-422 drive. I spent hours researching this, because the burner can make a huge difference in quality, and this drive gets great marks at the amazingly geeky and wonderful CDFreaks.com DVD burning forum. I wish other technology had this much data available. I have tested burns from DVDs done on my various older burners, including various Pioneer drives, my Plextor 760a, Plextor 800, and this new drive -- using TY02 Taiyo Yuden, Maxell (the original 2x that everyone used to love) and many others, and this make the lowest error rate burns of anything I've owned.

I orignally spec'd the computer with a Blu-Ray burner but pulled it because I still haven't had any requests for this technology, and haven't yet upgraded my own home theater (maybe after the economy picks up ...)

The case is a Lian PC-60A, similar to my old case.

I got a Samsung 2253BW monitor. Just one monitor. This is probably the weakest part of my setup. It's very nice, but I am sure others would have suggestions on a better monitor for Vegas.

The computer is dual boot with Win XP Pro (32-bit) on one drive, and Vista Business 64-bit on the other drive.

Other things: two hotswap SATA removable bays; memory card reader; and a 1 TB Seagate SATA-II drive (in one of the removable bays).

Performance Tests

I get 1:26 on the RenderTest HDV file, using Vegas 7.0d under WinXP Pro, rendering to HDV 1080i m2t using Best quality.

I get 1:28 using Vegas 8.0c on WinXP Pro.

I get 0:59 using Vegas 8.1 under Vista 64-bit.

I haven't read through all 334 posts in that Rendertest thread, but I think this is one of the fastest times posted by a non-overclocked, fan-cooled computer (there are one or two times reported that are half this, but I suspect they made the same mistake I initially did and used the Sony YUV codec which is the default after you first install 8.1).

I get full framerate playback of both HDV (from my FX1) and AVCHD (from a borrowed SR12), using Best Full (i.e., 1440x1080) resolution in the preview window. Playback holds up much better using 8.1 under Vista. In that environment, I can add color correction and other things and still maintain full framerate playback, even at Best-Full. Of course you MUST match the project settings to the video (i.e., DON'T use SD project settings for HD material).

I can go on, but that gives you the basics. If you want to see the specs, go to this page:

Polywell X5800A. After reading the specs, you can configure your own. This is not a cheap proposition, but for me it is as close to the "ultimate" stock Vegas computer as I know how to purchase (until dual CPU i7 mobos become available). I listed my configuration over in this thread: Polywell configuration (go to the bottom of the post).

I hope this helps someone! :)

Comments

Editguy43 wrote on 1/28/2009, 5:30 PM

Sounds like a great setup, the only thing I would suggest is going to Seagate's website and checking your 1T drive to see if it need a firmware update they are having trouble with the 1t and 1.5t drives.

Also with the kindof money you spent why only one monitor,
and why only a 22 inch, a 24" or 25" gives you more timeline and space to work with.

Or even 2, 22" monitors one for full screen monitoring or toolbar placement. I have 3 monitors and could never go back to just one.

But anyway all in all very cool and super fast system. I need to get a new one soon my core 2 quad is so so 2008 :-)

johnmeyer wrote on 1/28/2009, 6:21 PM

The monitor fits my edit bay. I still use a CRT for my external preview, so that is "sort of" my second monitor.

I saw the stories about the Seagate drive before I purchased and both the salesman and I checked. This was not one of the affected drives. As for Seagate vs. WD, Hitachi, Samsung, everyone seems to have their horror stories, but I've had good luck with all my hard drives over the years. CD-ROMs and DVDs, however, have been very prone to failure.

Editguy43 wrote on 1/28/2009, 7:27 PM

I haver had good luck with WD drives, but my edit system was updated last week to Vista 64 bit and 3 Seagate HD's 1 500g and 2 750g all is well so far, they seem to be fast and stable. the only problem I am having is my mouse is acting weird in Vegas. But I am likeing Vista. as I said Good luck and keep us infomed on the Core i7 performance.

Paul B

OH what is the warrenty on the polywell systems I have always liked them.

UlfLaursen wrote on 1/28/2009, 9:13 PM

Very nice PC you got there, John - congrats :-)

I have an 'old' dual core, one of the first, which I will upgrade with an I7 and Asus board also.

/Ulf

John_Cline wrote on 1/28/2009, 9:19 PM

Nice system, John, and great scores on the HDV Rendertest. I'm curious about one thing though, what did the salesman say to convince you to go with 15,000 rpm drives?

ushere wrote on 1/28/2009, 10:30 PM

looks good. still on my old e6600....

just flashed my 'defective' seagate drives - no problem - well, there wasn't any problem beforehand, other that some 'scary' horror stories.....

i think i'm going to hang on for both i7 prices to fall a little, and win 7 to come out - then i'll do the whole system at once. thought about patching this one up, but there isn't really anything wrong with it, so if it ain't broke, why fix it?

i want my toys, but the older i get, the more patience i have ;-)

leslie

johnmeyer wrote on 1/28/2009, 11:30 PM

The standard warranty (which is all I got) is "One year limited parts; five years labor; unlimited Polywell Technical Support."

I'm curious about one thing though, what did the salesman say to convince you to go with 15,000 rpm drives? Good insight, John. Yes, that was one of the things he talked me into. His initial logic was that applications would load faster. That didn't intrigue me at all, but as we talked I realized that I might occasionally need to deal with Cineform intermediates (60 GB/Hour) and perhaps other less-compressed formats, and that in those cases, the disk drive could be a performance bottleneck. While I'll only have about 150 GB free space between these two drives, and that won't hold huge amounts of lightly compressed HD, it should be enough for the kinds of projects I do, and I'll be able to get the best disk performance possible short of a true RAID (these are RAID controllers, but the drives are not configured for RAID).

He also suggested the hot swappable trays which many people in this forum have raved about, and I frankly am sick and tired of all these external drives taking up space, and costing extra money for the enclosure/power supply. Also, both USB and Firewire drives seemed to always have pauses and issues (although I think the USB on my old system was a little gimpy). So far the big SATA drive in the removable bay is good stuff.

He also suggested things that I had intended to get at one time or another but might have forgotten, like the built-in memory card reader. Like a GPS in a car, once you have it, you wonder why you ever did it any other way.

I kept my old keyboard and mouse, even though I was intrigued by what people here have said about the Logitech Revolution RX. I've just gotten used to the feel and quirks of my current interface.

My eyes, unfortunately, are no longer very good, and the big screen makes a huge difference.

Finally, I have done a little rendering with other applications which DO use the video card GPU, and while I don't have numbers as spectacular as what you quoted in another thread (I've got to get that software), I have been very impressed. Anyone who configures a video editing computer has got to think beyond Vegas, and therefore needs a good GPU. I was going to get an ATI card, but I think it was you or someone else a week ago who said they had nothing but problems with ATI cards, and that was certainly true for my old system, so I decided to go with nVidia instead. I think that was a good move.

farss wrote on 1/29/2009, 3:29 AM

You've done well for yourself. Never heard of Polywell before. I don't think they're sold down here. It's certainly money well spent buying good systems, my now quite old Supermicro system is still far from past it, handles HDV quite well and eats SD 10bit YUV.
Pretty jealous of those 15K drives but you should have got MORE of them, think RAID 10 :) I trust this new system has suitable amounts of bling, at least a few blue LED fan lights.
And thanks for reminding me, I've been meaning to fit an internal card reader to my new system.

Bob.

srode wrote on 1/29/2009, 5:02 PM

Very nice rig!

If you decide to upgrade the monitor - i'd suggest Dell 2709 - great color balance outof the box - you just have to turn the brightness way down. If it were my build, the only thing I would add would be at least a 1TB drive for storage and of course I'd run it up to 4.0ghz - with a thermalrite ultra extreme cooler or a peltier.

What power supply did you go with?

johnmeyer wrote on 1/29/2009, 6:52 PM

I opened it up and there is a fan at least five inches in diameter, with the brightest blue LED light glowing at the center. I'll dub it the "Robert Grand 'farss' Light."

Power supply is a 700W Quiet PFC SLI Power Supply -High Efficiency power supply. I think this is it:

FSP Group FX700-GLN 700W ATX12V V2.2/EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready Active PFC Power Supply

I got curious about power draw (and also I need to get a new UPS), so I put my ammeter in series with the computer. It was interesting to see the power draw change at various times during startup, and as I did different things. The largest draw I could create was 2.5 amps, during an 8-core Vegas 8.1 render under Vista. Of course that probably didn't stress the video card much, so I should probably have had my son fire up some sort of game.

The display draws 0.3 amps.

Thus, the peak is 2.5 amps. Multiply by 120V to get volt-amps which gives 300 volt-amps. Add 20-30% for a derating factor and that gives 390 volt-amps. The power factor on most switching power supplies is about 0.9 so multiply by this to get from volt-amps to watts (approximate) and you get down to about 350 watts.

The point is that, like almost everyone these days, I got a power supply that is far larger than what I need, or will ever need. In the old days of big stereo Hi-Fi amplifiers and linear power supplies some would make the argument of needing a fantastically oversized power supply in order to provide "peak power." I'm not sure I every totally understood whether that was garbage or whether that was true. Since there is no such metric at work here, the modern power supply ratings are probably vastly overstated, but I guess it doesn't cost much more for the bigger supply, either in money or in stuff taken from the environment, so it doesn't matter much.

I don't think over-sizing the power supply adds to its life. I have repaired quite a few switching power supplies (they fail a lot), and the capacitors take a beating from the 40 kHz "high frequency" oscillation (the ESR rises, they overheat, and self-destruct). This goes on even if the power supply isn't cranking out any amps. Thus, I think the supply aging is mostly a function of hours turned on, rather than whether it is run close to its limit.

I tested my old computers while I was at it, and my 1997-era Windows 95 PC draws 0.5 amp, and my recently retired 2002 Pentium P4 computer draw exactly 1.0 amp.

GaryAshorn wrote on 1/29/2009, 6:57 PM

Well, nice rig for sure and being an EE myself for several decades, I certainly recognize the writing style. Back last summer I went with a custom build too from IBUYPOWER and certainly happy with, It is posted somewhere here. Not quite as tricked out as yours and I agree with the BOXX prices as I checked them out too. Mine was just under $2K though and works well. Reading and research, that's what we EE do right?

Gary

johnmeyer wrote on 1/29/2009, 7:04 PM

that's what we EE do right?Yup. And, as you were writing, I revised my post to add a little more geekiness.

As for the price, mine was almost double what you paid, but most of that was due to going with the 3.2 GHz processor. I have never, in the past, purchased the top end of the processor range, because that last few percent of performance is dreadfully expensive. However, I'm at the time of my life where I don't expect to purchase many more of these, and really don't want to kill another week any time soon getting the thing in shape.

hazzardm wrote on 1/29/2009, 7:08 PM

The computer is dual boot with Win XP Pro (32-bit) on one drive, and Vista Business 64-bit on the other drive.

------------------------------

I'm curious. Was your decision for Vista Business an attempt to minimize the OS feature set?

johnmeyer wrote on 1/29/2009, 9:57 PM

Was your decision for Vista Business an attempt to minimize the OS feature set? I had no intention of EVER buying Vista, but the rendering improvement with 8.1 was too good to pass up, and this was my sole reason for buying this evil operating system. As far as "Business" vs. something else, I really didn't care about anything in Vista, so I got whatever the OEM offered.

hazzardm wrote on 1/30/2009, 9:55 AM

and this was my sole reason for buying this evil operating system.

LOL, Considering you have new components and peripherals, I think you will be pleasantly suprised at Vista SP1 stability. Nice system!

GaryAshorn wrote on 1/30/2009, 12:42 PM

Well, when I did mine I too thought about the techno edge and pulled back for the Q9450. Most were going Q6600 at the time and the Q9450 had just dropped in price to be not much over the Q6600. So I went with it and a MB that would support most all cards I would want to add etc. I did go Vista 64 but not business as you noted just above. I have added two 1TB drives in Raid 0 etc. I chose for cooling and expansion as well. Now 6 months later I see the I7s and other items and go WOW but then really how much more would I really get going to them? This one works well and will for a good while. ( I HOPE).

I do understand the comment your last one to get so go for the best. I suspect that will be my position on my next one. I still work as a full time EE in the industry and will for some time. But one day, I want that gone and only do video and teach tennis.

Gary

lynn1102 wrote on 1/30/2009, 4:48 PM

You guys are making me jealous. Both my systems are ONLY two years old and now they are technically antiques. But the still work find for what I do.

Lynn

johnmeyer wrote on 1/30/2009, 6:55 PM

You guys are making me jealous. Both my systems are ONLY two years old and now they are technically antiques. Actually, my old computer, which was in its seventh year, is for most things every bit as fast as this new one. If it wasn't for rendering, I'd barely notice the difference.

warriorking wrote on 1/30/2009, 8:25 PM

My Current Vegas build consists of the following'''

Vista Ultimate 64Bit
Vegas 8.1 Pro
Asus P5Q Pro
Intel Q9550 Quadcore 2.83Ghz
8Gig DDR2 Corsair PC800
Nvidia EVGA 295 GTX 1.8Gig Video Card
Auzentech 7.1 Prelude
3-1TB Seagate Hds
1-640Gig Samsung Hd
LG Blu-ray Burner
Liteon DVD Burner
ABS Tagan BZ 800Watt PS
Thermaltake Advanced Spedo Full Tower Case
24" Acer HDMI LCD /37" Vizio HDTV

srode wrote on 1/31/2009, 8:34 AM

Johnmeyer, have you had a chance to compare rendering time in DVDA? I'm very curious how the i7 impacts rendering time making discs, particularly in AVC format - it's painfully slow on my machine which actually renders very fast in Vegas 8.1 compared to most others in the speed test for a non-i7 system.

johnmeyer wrote on 1/31/2009, 9:25 AM

I never render in DVDA. Back when I first started using Vegas, about seven years ago, I asked the Sonic Foundry team, and they made it clear that it is pretty much ALWAYS better to render in Vegas, and then use DVDA only for preparation/authoring.

The one thing rendering in DVDA lets you do is to render to fit. However, once you have a good bitrate calculator (I created my own using Excel), you don't really need that feature.

Reasons to render in Vegas:

1. Two pass rendering. Only available in Vegas. This is an essential feature to get really good quality when using low bitrates (below 6,00,000 bps average).

2. No need to re-render when doing small changes. Smart re-prepare makes this less of an issue, but it is still important.

3. Ability to re-use already rendered material.

srode wrote on 1/31/2009, 9:34 AM

I do render in Vegas for MPEG2 and AVC - however AVC I can't get to complete in DVDA without forcing it to rerender - at least not for the files I am using - I normally try to fill up a disc - 21GB or so with menu driven project - the AVC format lets me get more files on the disc than MPEG 2 so I've been playing with that - a forced render all will take about 16 hours to complete the render - then it speeds up with the rest including burning in under 2 hours.

johnmeyer wrote on 1/31/2009, 11:46 AM

Ah, I haven't done any AVC renders, and I'm still using DVDA 4.5, which works really well for traditional DVD projects. Unlike Vegas, where I continue to voice many criticisms, I am an unabashed total fanboy for DVDA, version 4.5b.

marcel-vossen wrote on 2/25/2009, 4:36 AM

Hi John and other fellow video editors :)

I read your story on your new i7 based system and I was wondering if you could help me out.

I recently switched to editing in HD (mostly 1280x720, but my source, the Canon 5D mark II has 1920x1080.) The old PC with Intel core duo 6850 CPU couldnt handle this very well, my main concern is previewing since I am a pretty heavy user for Vegas, i sometimes use 5 layers on top of each other.

Because they told me at the phone support of Sony Vegas that the graphics card was not important for previewing , that it all comes down to CPU and RAM , I bought myself an i7 920 based system with a Gigabyte E58-UD5 motherboard and DDR3 6Gbyte of RAM. I bought a cheap Nvidia 9500 GT card with it since they said it didnt matter and thought my problems were over.

I have Vista 64 bits installed by the way.

But....to my surprise this system didnt perform better than my old one at least not in Vegas.
I still dont get a reasonable preview , not even in Preview auto mode. As soon as layers and effects are on the timeline, the framerate drops dramatically.

Even stranger was the fact that the 8.1 version of the software is even slower on my system as far as previewing is concerned, although I have a 64 bit system and OS.

I am really wondering which part of my system is the bottleneck at this moment, will it be the graphics card or maybe the harddrive, which is a Western Digital SATA 7200 standard 1T ? I saw that John put in some fancy 15.000 HDs but the movie data is still on the larger disks right?

I contacted the support for Vegas and got through to another person that seemed to know more about the technical details and to my surprise he told me that the Graphics card is very important for previewing.

Does anyone here know for sure where I should look first now for solving my preview problem?

I could go out and buy a GTX 280 card for 400 euros, but if it doesnt bring a lot extra, its a painfull experience for me again LOL

Of course I installed all the latest drivers for cards and board and even updated my BIOS, loaded the optimised bios defaults. I didnt think of using the AHDI mode in the BIOS though, I might try that if it helps but its a lot of extra work installing it all again...

Thanks in advance!